Jesus Christ is your savior, my savior, and the savior of all mankind!
So what does it mean to trust in him?
In the Bible "trust in" is basically a synonym for "believe in." Since belief and trust are the vital components of receiving God's salvation, let's hit it again.
1 John 1:9-10 (WEB) says,
9) If we confess our sins, he is faithful and righteous to forgive us the sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. 10) If we say that we haven’t sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.
Getting turned on to something requires passion. So what can give us passion for Christ? How about total forgiveness of all your sins: past, present, and future? God loves us like the wonderful Heavenly Father that he says he is and so he is trustworthy. Yet some interpret 1 John 1:9 to mean that Jesus only forgives us if we ask. Is this true? I have mentioned elsewhere that Jesus asked the Father to forgive us from the cross, even though no one was asking. Is there more proof?
Romans 5:9-11 (WEB) says,
9) Much more then, being now justified by his blood, we will be saved from God’s wrath through him. 10) For if while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, much more, being reconciled, we will be saved by his life. 11) Not only so, but we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received the reconciliation.
Now here is good news, awesome news, that ought to get us totally turned on to Jesus. The death of Christ reconciled us to God, forgiving all our sins, while we were yet his enemies! The love of God was fully given before we were Christians or even acknowledged Christ. The heart of my thesis in this book is that there is no condition to God's unconditional love... not even our faith. In fact it is silly to suggest that "trust" is the condition to God's unconditional love. It is silly because God wants us instead to trust that his love for us is unconditional and already given, just like Romans 5:9-11 says! The point is that we must be fully persuaded of God's unconditional love for us to know him as he is and to make him known.
If you believe God loves you on those terms, then you will be passionate to know and make known that he loves all mankind exactly the same way. Logically, to the exact same degree you have doubts about whether mankind's sins are forgiven, you will have doubts that your own sins are forgiven. This is true unless you are hypocritically trusting in a condition to God's love that you supplied. If you are trusting in a condition that you supplied, you may appear to have confidence, but again you are standing on thin ice above the fires of Hades.
Gerry Beauchemin boldly says on page 165 of Hope Beyond Hell, "The only way I [or you] can be truly assured I will be saved is if I believe that God saves all [mankind]." Do you claim that God loves you 100%? On what basis? A Christian can be 100% confident that God loves him because God loves all mankind. Robin Parry goes as far to say in The Evangelical Universalist that Calvinism has in fact corrupted the morals of its adherents. The Calvinist is 100% confident that God loves him and equally confident that God does not love all mankind. Parry boldly says that such a person has become morally corrupted from a false gospel and false understanding of the nature of God's love.
Trust is not the condition to God's unconditional love, but instead faith that God loves us unconditionally because he loves all mankind. Trust in Jesus!
